Mary Archer: I stood by Jeffrey because I am not a quitter
Wife of peer and novelist reveals that he wrote to her from Belmarsh prison to offer her a divorce
JEFFREY ARCHER offered his wife a divorce after being convicted of perjury, but she turned him down, saying, “I am just not a quitter”, she has disclosed.
Dame Mary Archer, 71, admitted that the obstacles the couple had faced over the years, from coming close to bankruptcy, to Lord Archer’s prison sentence and countless allegations of infidelity, had been tough, but said she believed in sticking by her husband.
In a joint interview with her husband, she told The Daily Telegraph: “Actually, from Belmarsh [prison] Jeffrey wrote to me and said, ‘Do you want to stay in this marriage? I feel I have let you down’. That was really the nearest we have ever come to talking about it. A partnership is about helping your partner in time of difficulty. That is when it matters. I am just not a quitter.”
Dame Mary said the first crisis in their 50-year marriage proved to be the hardest to endure, when Lord Archer, then a Tory MP, lost all their money in a fraudulent investment scheme in 1974, leaving them penniless.
“For me, the debt crisis, losing the house, losing the security that you need when you are the mother of two small children, making a completely new life, that was the toughest thing I have ever done,” she said. “By far.”
While she admitted that her husband’s 1987 libel action against the Dai
ly Star was “very stressful indeed” and the string of alleged affairs “not pretty”, she insisted that it would be harder to grow old without each other.
“I suppose I just take the rational view that lots of things go on in lots of marriages that are less than ideal and mostly they stay private and that’s how it really should be,” she said.
Lord Archer, 75, added: “Mary doesn’t have the sins that I have to exculpate myself from, but I think she’d be the first to say that it is a marriage of equals.”
The best-selling novelist put the longevity of their marriage down to the fact that they always had something to talk about. “We don’t ever get bored with each other,” he said.
Dame Mary insisted she had never considered divorce, but joked that she thought of murder “frequently”.
“I’m tempted to quote Lady Longford on her husband, the Labour peer and prison reformer. When asked, ‘Have you ever thought of divorce?’, she replied, ‘Divorce, never; murder, frequently’.” She added: “Fidelity is a great quality but kindness, loyalty and resilience are also very important.”
The couple have suffered ill health in recent years. Lord Archer began treatment for prostate cancer in 2013; Lady Archer had bladder cancer in 2010.
“Intimations of old age are much easier to face together,” she said.
Interview: Weekend
‘Jeffrey wrote to me and said, “Do you want to stay in this marriage? I feel I have let you down”’